Moments after the press conf, Fires has a moment of relief of not having to be interviewed
Andrew Fire PhD of Standford Univ School of Medicine. Won Noble Prize for his breakthrough genetics research. He is a prof of pathology and of genetics at Stanford Event on 10/3/06 in Stanford.
Penni Gladstone / The Chronicle less

Moments after the press conf, Fires has a moment of relief of not having to be interviewed
Andrew Fire PhD of Standford Univ School of Medicine. Won Noble Prize for his breakthrough genetics research. He is a ... more

Photo: Penni Gladstone

Image 2 of 3

Anne Villeneuve, a Prof of developmental biology & genetics and long time collegue of Fire's gives him a congratulatory hug.
Andrew Fire PhD of Standford Univ School of Medicine. Won Noble Prize for his breakthrough genetics research. He is a prof of pathology and of genetics at Stanford Event on 10/3/06 in Stanford.
Penni Gladstone / The Chronicle less

Anne Villeneuve, a Prof of developmental biology & genetics and long time collegue of Fire's gives him a congratulatory hug.
Andrew Fire PhD of Standford Univ School of Medicine. Won Noble Prize for his ... more

Stanford Professor Andrew Fire and colleague Craig Mello of the University of Massachusetts were awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine for their discovery of how tiny molecules of RNA can turn off genes like a switch -- creating a powerful tool for molecular biologists and blazing a trail toward new kinds of drugs to treat diseases as diverse as cancer and AIDS.

Fire, 47, a professor of pathology and genetics at Stanford University School of Medicine, was awakened at 2 a.m. by the coveted call from Stockholm, and thought at first he might have been dreaming.

"I've been lucky all my career," Fire said at Stanford. "I've had great co-workers, great institutions."

It was only eight years ago that Fire and Mello opened a new field in molecular biology with the publication in the British journal Nature of their work identifying tiny snippets of RNA -- the chemical cousin of DNA -- as molecular switches that can turn off the protein-making work of genes.

Because their research tapped into one of the fundamental processes used in most living things, the field of "RNA interference" may yield treatments for a vast array of diseases. Cancer, for example, is caused when genes run amok and trigger uncontrolled growth in a cell. Tiny coils of RNA can act like a monkey wrench in the gears of these runaway cells.

Similarly, interfering RNA may be a route to blocking viral replication. Sirna Therapeutics, a small biotech company in San Francisco, is developing a potential treatment for hepatitis C, a blood-borne virus that attacks the liver.

Mello, 45, described the pair's discovery as just one piece of a puzzle. "I think it is opening a door to a whole new frontier from which we can learn so much more about our body's own protective mechanisms," he said.

He and Fire collaborated on their pathbreaking research using the new technology of e-mail and the Internet as they explored RNA interference in the genes of the microscopic roundworm. At the time, Fire worked at the Department of Embryology of the Carnegie Institution of Washington in Baltimore, where he was also a professor at Johns Hopkins University. He was recruited to Stanford several years later, in 2003.

"This little beast," as Fire described the roundworm C. elegans, yielded the secret role of RNA in turning off specific genes, and that same process has since been found in flies, mice and human beings.

Previously, scientists had thought that RNA performed only the mundane task of reading the chemical coded instructions of DNA and shuttling the information to the protein-making engines inside cells.

Although other researchers were exploring the concept of gene silencing and even the role that RNA might play in the process, Fire and Mello's key discovery was that tiny coils of a rarer "double-stranded" RNA could do the job.

So revolutionary was the notion that the journal Science in 2002 named RNA interference the "Breakthrough of the Year."

The primary application of the technology is in the laboratory, where manufactured pieces of interfering RNA are used to knock out specific genes in mice or fruit flies or colonies of cells. That lets scientists observe how the missing gene affects other biological processes, such as the ability to fight off bacteria or control cancer. Fire, who lives with his family on the Stanford campus, said he chose to return to the Bay Area, where he grew up and went to college, because the School of Medicine encourages multidisciplinary research where discoveries in the lab are readily shared with clinicians treating patients.

Fire was born at Stanford Hospital, grew up in Sunnyvale and graduated at the age of 16 from Fremont High School. He did his undergraduate work at UC Berkeley, where he had expected to major in mathematics but was inspired by a course in molecular biology during his senior year. He earned his doctorate from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1983.

As a high school student, he told the gathering at Stanford, he applied to just two colleges, Stanford and UC Berkeley. "I went to the one place I got in," he said.

Fire stressed that his work builds on the work of other colleagues, including his friend Su Guo, a UCSF researcher who -- as a graduate student at Cornell -- discovered a surprise gene-silencing effect when she put single strands of RNA into roundworms. The work intrigued Fire, and with further research he found that double-stranded forms of the molecule that were unintentionally injected into the worms were responsible for the gene-silencing effect.

Guo said Monday that she was delighted that Fire and Mello had won the Nobel Prize. "I was playing around with some experiments, and made a discovery serendipitously. Andy made the leap, following up on that puzzling finding," she said.

The award is formally known as the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. The two recipients will travel to Stockholm in December to accept the award, and also will split $1.4 million in cash that accompanies it.

Monday's award will be followed today with the announcement of the Nobel Prize in Physics, followed by the announcement of prizes in chemistry, economics and the Nobel Peace Prize. A date for awarding the Nobel Prize in Literature has not been set.